there is a way to avoid strict libraries linking?

Steve Franks bahamasfranks at gmail.com
Thu Apr 22 22:38:15 UTC 2010


> It's much safer to just leave the libraries alone.  Just because you
> upgraded libpng doesn't mean that your old gtk binary will stop working
> (assuming you are using "portupgrade" or "portmaster -w" which preserves old

<About to get flamed, I know>  Untrue.  Portupgrade deletes the old
version of the port by default.  The PNG upgrade was a major PITA,
because I installed one new port that thought it had to have it.  I'm
sure 98% of the ports I then had to upgrade would have still worked
just fine even if rebuilt against the old libpng.

I think the complaint here is that the port dependencies system
frequently gives the impression/enforces the rule that new ports will
depend on whatever the most current version of everything is in the
ports tree at the time they were built, forcing sort of a perpetual
upgrade cycle.  IMHO this is probably due to naive port maintainers
(such as myself) incorrectly pointing a port at libpng.5 instead of
any libpng, or libpng >= 5.  Once the ports tree is 'poisoned' in this
fashion, there's really no going back.  I'd sure vote for an audit of
this behavior as a summer of code project.

Long story short, anything that sounds fundamental gets bumped (png,
jpeg, tcl, python, gtk, etc, etc), I just sit back and get ready to
spend two or three days retrying portupgrade -akOf -mBATCH=yes until
everything sticks.  If you've got OO or KDE4 installed, you might just
want to forget it and pkg_delete -f *, then start over.

I'm sticking by bsd though.  You don't even have the opportunity to
run an automated tool to clean & build everything from source
automatically on linux.  I'm sure rpm & apt dependencies are even
nastier.

Steve


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